Black Lightning’s third season has been all about fighting against the big, bad Markovians — but how much of a threat are they really?

It’s only been three episodes of Black Lightning, but this season has already taken me on quite a wild ride.

The first episode dropped us into the series’ new normal — one that was about as abnormal as you can get.

With the Markovian threat hanging over everyone’s head and national security under attack, Freeland went into lockdown, Black Lightning went underground, and the Pierce family as a whole were supposed to keep their feet firmly on the ground.

Meaning — no flying off to save lives and no fighting back against the trampling of civil liberties.

I spent all of the first episode — and my review of said episode — predicting that the Markovian threat was a complete farce concocted by the ASA to keep control of the Freeland’s meta population and Freeland’s most popular meta family, the Pierces.

Of course, Black Lightning itself completely rebuffed that prediction in the second episode, when it showed that not only do the Markovians exists — but they are, in fact, in or around Freeland and ready to return home covered in “glory and American blood.”

So, despite my initial prediction that the Markovian threat was completely fabricated by the ASA as a means of gaining control over Freeland and the Pierces, the show made it clear that they weren’t a complete figment of the ASA’s imagination.

The Markovians are here, they’re pissed and they’re ready to do whatever dirty work is necessary to complete their objective.

But as the Black Lightning season winds on, I’m beginning to question whether their objective is actually what we’ve been told. And the even bigger question looming over all the storylines for me is: how big of a threat are the Markovians in comparison to the ASA, broadly, and Agent Odell, specifically?

I mentioned in my last review that Black Lightning has come quite a ways in making me admire — and, yes, at times even like — Agent Odell.

Of course, I don’t think he’s a good guy by any means — we’ve seen him threaten, intimidate, lie, and kill others to further his own ends. Saying he has a flexible moral compass at this point would really be a stretch. However, there’s something to be said for the fact that I don’t think Agent Odell would call himself a good guy, either. He said as much to Lynn and Jefferson at the beginning of the season, and I don’t think it was purely for sure.

He may not be a good guy, but I admire being able to look at yourself with that kind of clarity, just as I admire Odell’s ability to pursue his objectives with a similar kind of clarity. What’s frustrating about him is the same thing that makes him one of the most interesting characters on the show: He is totally committed to completing his mission and he’s very good at getting there.

In this way, Agent Odell is like the Kawhi Leonard of government agents — he does everything in his own time, in the exact way he wants it done, and he doesn’t let himself get distracted by the surrounding noise.

The surrounding noise here being: individual lives, people’s privacy, personal freedoms and accepted norms for morality.

The fact that he can pursue his goal so coldly and so efficiently is why I think that despite being shown the Markovians and told that they’re a threat to the lives of metas and the national security of the U.S., it’s actually the ASA and Agent Odell who pose the biggest threat to Freeland and the Pierce family in this season of Black Lightning.

Black Lightning has shown as that the Markovians exist and that they’re not overly fond of Americans, but nearly everything else we know about them and their violent tendencies have been filtered through the lens of the ASA and Odell.

To me, knowing that they exist and knowing that they’re a threat constitute two very different things, and I think there’s still enough ambiguity in the show to posit the fact that they aren’t as big of a threat as we might think.

When it comes down to it, we don’t really know much about the reality of the threat presented by the Markovians. However, the show has shown us time and again the very real and very immediate threat posed by Agent Odell, especially in this week’s Black Lightning episode, “Agent Odell’s Pipe-Dream.”

In it, we see the way in which Odell so expertly manipulates nearly every member of the Pierce family. Of course he needs them, but he also has so much more leverage over them than they have over him, mostly by the fact that they all genuinely care about other people and he only cares about his mission.

He’s spent over half a season using Lynn’s concern for the pod kids and metahumans for his own ends. In “Agent Odell’s Pipe-Dream,” he manipulates Jefferson into taking back Dr. Jace using a promise of freedom — while also giving him a new watch and costume that is almost certainly a way to keep tabs on him.

And, most dastardly of all, he manipulates Jen into destroying what is supposedly a Markovian data farm. First of all, he has her keep her distance from it, shooting it from high up in the air without seeing if it was truly what he said it was. Secondly, he’s able to get her to even do the mission because he tells her they killed Khalil’s mom.

Which we know isn’t true! Odell, in fact, brainwashed Khalil into becoming a perfect soldier, and then sent him to kill his own mother just so he could see if his new toy worked properly.

Given everything that we’ve seen Odell do this season and the lengths which he’ll go to achieve his objectives, I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to assume that he’d manipulate the severity and the scope of the Markovian threat to keep the upper hand on the Pierce family.

Any time we’ve seen the threat of Markovians against Freeland and the ASA, it’s been Odell and the ASA telling us that it’s the Markovians. Nearly all of worst deeds and atrocities committed in Freeland and to metas has come at the hand of the ASA.

In fact, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the Markovians are in or around Freeland in retaliation for something that the ASA did first. Perhaps the ASA kidnapped Markovian kids to experiment on and the Markovians are trying to take them back, or perhaps the ASA even completed the same kind of experiment in Markovia as was done in Freeland.

Or perhaps this is just me completely spinning out and coming up with some galaxy brain theories that — like my very first theory that the Markovian threat was completely fabricated — will be completely overturned in the coming episodes.

Still, being able to go full galaxy brain on television shows is half the fun of it, and Black Lightning has done a fantastic job this season at keeping us on the edge of our seats and wondering what’s happening next.

So I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I will say that the show’s going to have to show Markovians doing some real dastardly things for them to even hold a candle to what the ASA and Odell have done so far. Because so far the biggest threat to the peace and security of Freeland and its inhabitants is the agency — and its biggest agent — who keeps saying that what they’re doing is meant to keep everyone safe.